When I wrote the article about my first year as a medical marijuana patient, it got the attention of the folks at The 420 Times, and they had their feature writer do a (really cool, IMHO) interview with me, which you can read here.

(Yes, I know I write for them, but the coincidence of my one-year anniversary as a patient and still being alive got their attention specifically 🙂

Anyway, I wanted to highlight a few things in that interview that I think will be of great interest to you faithful followers of my blog. I don’t think The 420 Times will mind if I quote myself 🙂 This first one is a DIY method of, essentially, mixing your own medicine from existing strains…and when I say “mixing”, I mean physically and literally mixing your ground-up cannabis:

…At times when I’ve found one strain to be lacking, I invent my own…What I do is take strains with known effects and physically combine them. For example, Purple Kush is good stuff, but it often makes me more sleepy than I’d like. I have some Casey Jones, which if I use on its own, gets me feeling a bit anxious and speeds up my heart rate. So I mix them together – one part CJ to 2 parts PK – and presto, I have a mixture where the two components cancel each other’s side effects out.

And then there’s My Theory:

For quite a while now, I’ve had a theory that cannabis, in small doses, tends to normalize your brain and body chemistry. This is borne out, at least in my experience, by the fact that I’ve had a consistent problem with mental “fog” and depression, that a consistent dose of a consistent strain has consistently helped me with. But now, the combined shock to my system of cardiac arrest, heart attack, and pneumonia has totally thrown my body out of whack, and I’ve found that I have to almost start experimenting from scratch. To me, that’s just more proof that everybody needs a different mix of cannabinoids, depending solely on what you’re physically and mentally dealing with.

I wanted to follow up on this one because, in the two weeks since the interview, my entire regimen went topsy-turvy. Sour Diesel stopped working its magic, and there was no longer such a thing as a “normal dosage”. Canna Caps that previously had a consistent effect of getting me to [3.5] every single time had no effect whatsoever…I had to take two to even feel them.

I had already reasoned that I had been “reset”, so I pulled out my old collection of two dozen strains and started vaping. Nothing seemed to work right. But then one day I had a “highdea” and said, “It’s as if everything was turned upside-down”, so I started using indicas specifically (rather than my usual sativas). Eureka! I took more Canna Caps (which I had made from Purple Kush) at much higher doses than previously, and things started working again.

Lately I’ve been vaping a custom mixture of Sour Diesel, Purple Kush, and Casey Jones, again at much higher doses than before, and right now that seems to be working well. I suspect that my cannabinoid system was seriously depleted, and my body just really needed more cannabis to function properly!